computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

, a pagoda is a

priority queue In computer science, a priority queue is an abstract data-type similar to a regular queue or stack data structure in which each element additionally has a ''priority'' associated with it. In a priority queue, an element with high priority is se ...

implemented with a variant of a

binary tree In computer science, a binary tree is a k-ary k = 2 tree data structure in which each node has at most two children, which are referred to as the ' and the '. A recursive definition using just set theory notions is that a (non-empty) binar ...

. The root points to its children, as in a binary tree. Every other node points back to its parent and down to its leftmost (if it is a right child) or rightmost (if it is a left child) descendant leaf. The basic operation is merge or meld, which maintains the heap property. An element is inserted by merging it as a singleton. The root is removed by merging its right and left children. Merging is bottom-up, merging the leftmost edge of one with the rightmost edge of the other.

References

* J. Francon, G. Viennot, and J. Vuillemin, Description and analysis of an efficient priority queue representation, Proc. 19th Annual Symp. on Foundations of Computer Science. IEEE, 1978, pages 1–7. * R. Nix, An Evaluation of Pagodas, Res. Rep. 164, Dept. of Computer Science, Yale Univ. 1988? * Priority queues {{Algorithm-stub